All the characteristic symptoms of the various steps that lead up to insanity, the rapid passage from profound grief to excessive joy, may be found in Schopenhauer. In a moment of tranquil reflection on himself, in 1814, after having found that men were “a soup of bread dipped in water with a little arsenic,” and after having declared that “their egoism is like that which binds the dog to his master,” he wrote: “And now do not except yourself; examine your loves and your friendships; observe if your objective judgments are not in great part subjective and impure.” And in another page: “Just as the most beautiful body contains within it fæcal and mephitic gases, so the noblest character offers traits of badness, and the greatest genius presents traces of pettiness and excessive pride.”
The same alternations may be found throughout his life; sometimes, a keen and contemptuous critic, he shows haughty presumption; at other times he descends to the lowest literary platitudes; sometimes he wandered about the delightful suburbs of Dresden lost in the contemplation of nature; at other times he wallowed in prosaic love adventures, from which distinguished friends were obliged to save him, and this while he was elaborating his great work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, which was to astonish the world. “He thus,” remarks Von Sedlitz, “gave the example of a mania puerperii spiritualis, such as sometimes takes possession of pregnant women.” Schopenhauer himself told Frauenstedt that at the time when he was writing his great work he must have been very strange in his person and behaviour, as people took him for a madman. One day when he was walking in a conservatory at Dresden, and, while contemplating the plants, talked aloud to himself and gesticulated, an attendant came up and asked him who he was. “If you can tell me who I am,” replied Schopenhauer, “I shall be very much obliged to you.” And he walked away leaving the astonished attendant fully persuaded that he was a lunatic. With such a disposition it is not surprising that Schopenhauer, like many prophets, believed that he was impelled by a demon or spirit. “When my intelligence had touched its apogee, and was, under favourable conditions, at its point of greatest tension, it was capable of embracing anything; it could suddenly bring forth revelations and give birth to chains of thought well worthy of preservation.”[184] In 1816 he wrote: “It happens to me among men as to Jesus of Nazareth when he had to awake his disciples always asleep.” Even in old age he spoke of his great work in such a way as to exclude all doubt as to the inspiration which had produced it, such a work only being possible under the influence of inspiration. At that age he gazed with astonishment at his work, especially at the fourth book, as at a work written by some other person. It is worth while recalling here the doubling of personality so common in men of genius.
After he had handed his book over to the publisher he set out for Italy, without awaiting its publication, with the proud faith that he had given a revelation to the world. His délire des grandeurs at this period increased, and the mental disturbance he underwent revealed itself later. He wrote: “In enchanting Venice, Love’s arms held me long enfettered, until an inner voice bade me break free and lead my steps elsewhere.” And again: “If I could only satisfy my desire to look upon this race of toads and vipers as my equals, it would be a consolation to me.” While oscillating between mental exaltation and depression he heard of the collapse of his banking-house. It is easy to understand the grief which this news caused him; he was reduced to the necessity of living by philosophy, instead of for philosophy, as he had desired to do. He twice sought to become a Privatdozent in Berlin, but he was unsuccessful in these attempts. His violent attacks on his contemporaries displeased his hearers, and his passionate disputations, and his tenacity in holding strange opinions, which he gave forth as oracles, rendered precarious his relations with friends and men of learning.
The invasion of cholera, at the beginning of 1831, completed his troubles. On the last night of 1830 he had already had a dream, which he looked upon as a prophecy, foretelling his death in the new year. “This dream,” he wrote in his Cogitata, “influenced me in my departure from Berlin immediately the cholera began in 1831. I had scarcely reached Frankfort-on-the-Main, when I had a very distinct vision of spirits. They were, as I think, my ancestors, and they announced to me that I should survive my mother, at that time still living. My father, who was dead, carried a light in his hand.” That this hallucination was accompanied by real brain affection is proved by the fact that at that time he “fell into deep melancholy, not speaking to any one for weeks together.” The doctors were alarmed, and induced him to go to Mannheim for change of scene. More than a year later he returned to Frankfort, when the acute period of his illness had apparently passed. Signs of it remained, however, in his peculiar bearing, his habit of gesticulating and talking aloud to himself as he walked through the streets of the city, or sat at table in the restaurant, and in his fury against “such philosophasters as Hegel, Schleiermacher, and similar charlatans, who shine like so many stars in the firmament of philosophy, and rule the philosophic market.” He accused them of depriving him of the praise and fame he deserved, by deliberately keeping silence concerning his work. This was a fixed idea with him, like the idea of his own infallibility, even after he seemed to return to a relatively normal condition, thanks to the fame which, after a delay of thirty years, at length crowned his name and his works.
His délire des grandeurs, his melancholy accompanied by morbid rage, born of the idea of persecution, had really shown themselves in him from childhood. At six years of age he believed that his parents wished to abandon him. As a student he was always morose. One of the things which caused him most trouble was noise, especially when produced by the whips of drivers. “To be sensitive to noise,” he wrote, “is one of the numerous misfortunes which discount the privilege of genius.” “Qui non habet indignationem,” he wrote, “non habet ingenium.” But his indignation was excessive, a morbid rage. One day when his landlady was chattering in the anteroom he came out and shook her so violently that he broke her arm, and was fined for damages. He was genuinely hypochondriacal. He was driven from Naples by the fear of small-pox, from Verona by the idea that he had been poisoned by snuff, from Berlin by the dread of cholera, and previously by the conscription. In 1831, he had a fresh attack of restlessness; at the least sound in the street he put his hand to his sword; his fear became real suffering; he could not open a letter without suspecting some great misfortune; he would not shave his beard, but burnt it; he hated women and Jews and philosophers, especially philosophers, and loved dogs, remembering them in his will. He reasoned about everything, however unimportant; about his great appetite, about the moonlight, which suggested quite illogical ideas to him, &c. He believed in table-turning, and that magnetism could heal his dog’s paws and restore his own hearing. One night the servant dreamt that she had to wipe some ink stains; in the morning he spilt some, and the great philosopher deduced that “everything happens necessarily.”
He was contradiction personified. He placed annihilation, nirvana, as the final aim of life, and predicted (which means that he desired), one hundred years of life. He preached sexual abstinence as a duty, but did not himself practise it. He who had suffered so much from the intolerance of others, insulted Moleschott and Büchner, and rejoiced when the Government deprived them of their professorial chairs.
He lived on the first storey, in case of fire; would not trust himself to his hairdresser; hid gold in the ink-pot, and letters of change beneath the bed-clothes. “When I have no troubles,” he said (like Rousseau), “it is then that I am most afraid.” He feared to touch a razor; a glass that was not his own might communicate some disease; he wrote business documents in Greek or Latin or Sanskrit, and disseminated them in books to prevent unforeseen and impossible curiosity, which would have been much easier avoided by a simple lock and key. Though he regarded himself as the victim of a vast conspiracy of professors of philosophy, concerted at Gotha, to preserve silence concerning his books, he yet dreaded lest they should speak of them; “I would rather that worms should gnaw my body than that professors should gnaw my philosophy.” Lacking all affection, he even insulted his mother, and drew from her example conclusions against the whole female sex, “long of hair and short of sense.” Yet, while despising monogamy, he recommended tetragamy, to which he saw but one objection—the four mothers-in-law. The same lack of affection made him despise patriotism, “the passion of fools, and the most foolish of passions;” he took part with the soldiers against the people, and to the former and to his dog he left his property. He was always preoccupied with himself, not only with the self that was the creator of a new system, but in hundreds of his letters he speaks with strange complaisance of his photograph, of his portrait in oils and of a person who had bought it “in order to place it in a kind of chapel, like the image of a saint.”
No one has, for the rest, maintained more openly than Schopenhauer, the relationship of genius to insanity. “People of genius,” he wrote, “are not only unpleasant in practical life, but weak in moral sense and wicked.” And elsewhere: “Such men can have but few friends; solitude reigns on the summits.... Genius is closer to madness than to ordinary intelligence.... The lives of men of genius show how often, like lunatics, they are in a state of continual agitation.”
Nicolaï Vasilyevitch Gogol (born 1809), after suffering from an unhappy love affair, gave himself up for many years to unrestrained onanism, and became eventually a great novelist. Having known Poushkin he was attracted to the short story, then he fell under the influence of the Moscow school, and became a humourist of the highest order. In his Dead Souls he satirises the Russian bureaucracy with so much vis comica as to show the need of putting an end to a form of government which is a martyrdom both for the victims and the executioners.
On the publication of his historical Cossack romance, Taras Bulba, he reached the summit of his fame. His admirers compared him to Homer; even the Government patronized him. Then a new idea began to dominate him; he thought that he painted his country with so much crudity and realism that the picture might incite to a revolution which would not be kept within reasonable limits, and might overturn society, religion, and the family, leaving him the remorse of having provoked it. This idea took possession of his mind and dominated it, as it had formerly been dominated by love, by the drama, and by the novel. He then sought by his writings to combat western liberalism, but the antidote attracted fewer readers than the poison. Then he abandoned work, shut himself up in his house, giving himself up to prayer to the saints, and supplicating them to obtain God’s pardon for his revolutionary sins. He accomplished a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, from which he returned somewhat consoled, when the revolution of 1848 broke out, and his remorse was again aroused. He was constantly pursued by visions of the triumph of Nihilism, and in his alarm he called on Holy Russia to overthrow the pagan West, and to found on its ruins the orthodox Panslavist empire. In 1852, the great novelist was found dead at Moscow of exhaustion, or rather of tabes dorsalis, in front of the shrine before which he was accustomed to lie for days in silent prayer.